Country diary: if they're not tadpoles what are these little wrigglers?

Stamford, Lincolnshire: These curious creatures won’t grow into cute froglets, they’ll be menacing little blood suckers

In a week, heat, then rain. Heavy air settles, and thunder seems hiding around its edges. Water collects in everything concave. Then my five-year-old daughter comes in and tells us there are tadpoles outside.

It’s late for tadpoles. I’ve seen no frogspawn, but she’s insistent. And there, in an outdoor sink, amid leaf rot, detritus and two inches of stagnant rain, is that familiarly sinuous movement: front heavy, tail frantic. Only not quite.

These don’t move like tadpoles. Enlivened by a shake, they wriggle, but in a kind of weird sidewinder recoil around the leafbergs and twig-jams. I scoop some into a glass bottle, and wait for the contents to settle. The detritus falls to the bottom and I stoop so the clearing water is backlit against the sky. There is every size of these things, from barely visible to segmented and complex, the shape of a claymore and the size of a rice grain, all moving in that way. As the water stills, the bigger ones align in a strange colonnade at its surface, thick end down, anchored to the surface like little snorkelers. I start to itch as I watch them. Not tadpoles. Not even close.

Of all creatures’ existence, many could argue that the mosquito’s is the hardest to justify. I could tell my daughter that instead of the fun of watching a little frog develop, we will instead be treated to watching these pupae emerge as the deadliest creature on the planet. Winged vector of dreaded disease, sucker of blood – and one of the few creatures to have had studies done on the potential impact of eradicating the 100 or so nastier species. The dengue- and Zika-spreading Aedes aegypti, say. We shouldn’t, and probably couldn’t. As much as we think we’ve got the consequences covered, nature will remind us that we don’t.

Most mosquitoes are vegetarian. Some are food for other things. Some are controllers of others’ populations, including ours, maybe. And mosquitoes do have at least one unambiguous point – one perfectly demonstrated by my bottle and its contents. Their point is to make more mosquitoes. And as the country warms, we’d better get used to it.

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